Google Ads is one of the most powerful paid advertising platforms available to marketers. Through this, you can ensure your search and display advertising is distributed to an audience of billions of internet users every day, with a range of targeting tools to ensure you’re being seen by the most relevant target audiences.
However, to take full advantage of this, you can’t operate in a vacuum. If you want to get the best return on investment, it pays to understand exactly what your competitors are doing. This includes what keywords they’re bidding on, when they’re running ads and more. And fortunately, there is a free tool to help with this – Google Ads Transparency.
The primary aim of this platform is to give users more information and control over the ads they see when using Google. But it also works as a highly useful additional resource for advertisers, letting you gain insight into their activities.
Google Ads Transparency is intended to build trust and accountability on how ads are run across the Google Ads network. It has its roots as a way to improve political advertising on the platform, which was intended to verify advertisers and allow users to see clearly who had paid for political ads. Such transparency enabled users to make more informed decisions about the products and services they engage with. However, it has since expanded to become a searchable hub for information about all content provided by verified advertisers.
Within the dashboard, users can gain information about campaigns being run by verified advertisers across Google search, the Display Network, Gmail and YouTube over the last 30 days. As it is a searchable database, this means you can use it to gain direct insight into the ads your competitors are running without the need for third-party analysis tools – you simply enter their company name or website URL into the site and hit search.
Once you’ve found a competitor, you can use the Google Ads Transparency Center to do the following:
The ad info you can see as a result of this can be used in a number of ways, but here are some of the more common use cases you’re likely to be able to take advantage of.
One of the biggest advantages of Google Ads Transparency is that the data comes directly from the source. While other third-party ad analytics may rely on incomplete data scraped from Google, the Ads Transparency Center offers direct integration with all aspects of the Google Ad Network, including search, display and video. As it’s also free to use, this is an ideal option for revising and optimising your own ad strategy based on what competitors are doing without the need for capital investment in expensive analytics tools.
However, the service is not without its limitations. For example, it can’t show you exactly what specific keywords competitors are focusing on for their ads, or what campaign settings they’re using. Although you can make some inferences, this means you’ll have limited insight into their approach to targeting, budgeting and bidding strategy, which can be important when it comes to determining Google ads costs for your own efforts..
What’s more, the ads don’t show you what landing pages they direct to, so you won’t be able to simulate what happens further down the user journey once an ad is clicked to learn more about competitors’ conversion strategies.
The insight offered can be found in the Google Ads Transparency Center, which allows users to search for any verified advertiser using the Google platform. You can find this resource here, while it can also be accessed directly from any ad you see on Google via the search provider’s My Ad Center page by clicking the three dots next to it.
Once here, you can search directly for any key competitors. As long as they are verified, the dashboard will show you what ads they are running. By default it will show ads across all formats and topics for your local region. However, you can filter this by format and timeframe to narrow down your search.
As noted above, the Transparency Center also shows ads from companies that have been verified with Google. This means that they have proven they are a legitimate organisation and are who they claim to be by providing acceptable documentation. As well as ensuring the company’s identity, it guarantees that ads comply with Google’s content policies.
If you want to know more about how marketers can use tools like Google Ads Transparency to guide their strategy, get in touch with the Google Ads agency at Axonn today.
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